The expansion for the dark dungeon crawler has come out of the shadows. Expect a variety of new blood-sucking monsters and other horrors to be front and center.

I’m quite fond of the challenge found in Darkest Dungeon [Official Site]. It generally hits the right balance between keeping you on your toes and gratuitous punishment. That’s why it’s exciting to see that this dungeon crawler continues to see new updates and, now, its first expansion. It’s a game that can see your characters develop mental conditions or go outright insane, so vampires and the so-called “Crimson Curse” are right at home.

The highlights of the DLC are as follows:

A new hero class. “Awash in blood and delusion, they bear the burden of a thousand lifetimes.”

The DLC isn’t the only thing that’s new for the game, as there's also been a patch released. Aside from the usual bug fixes, balancing changes that are usually the part of all updates, there’s some new free content too. A new tonic that combats horror might make things a little easier for would-be adventurers if it wasn’t for the fact that there’s also new ways afflicted characters can act out, with potentially disastrous consequences. You can see the not-very-detailed patch notes here.

Well, I bought the base game. I can get the DLC at a later date. Various people are suggesting the DLC is better for advanced players, than for people just starting off.

Now I've played the base game for about 3 hours. It is somewhat unforgiving and brutal, and I can see why typical gamers wouldn't find it especially appealing. (Death by Random Number Generator, heh.)

I like the core game, how it plays. It is well put together, a polished experience. But, my own little take on it is this (and based on the fact that I'm a big fan of unforgiving game FTL) : I'd like to start each game completely fresh, with a new set of characters, and take them on a 'perma-death' journey through the RPG adventure, gaining experience, gaining items over the course of the adventure. Maybe when you've got so far through each playthrough you've managed to unlock different (previously inaccessible) bits of the map, or you have access to different characters (with different skills) and need to use different strategies (based on new character classes).

With Darkest Dungeon, you are playing a long, long drawn-out campaign where each playthrough you are slowly grinding equipment and access to buildings in town, and upgrading those things, as well as upgrading your crew of heroes. So, playthrough 1 you are at a distinct disadvantage to playthrough 100.

It's certainly okay, how they have it now. But my preference would be more how I've described. A little more FTL-like, where each campaign starts fresh. (Assuming you have unlocked things (characters, maps, etc) in your FTL-like Darkest Dungeon, then you could try fresh play-throughs with those choices instead.)

Basically, Darkest Dungeon is a bit more grindy than I'd like it to be.

Last edited by g000h at 20 June 2017 at 10:04 pm UTC

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